Well, a dilemma doesn't mean a contradiction, just a pair of unpalatable choices. Some people get all worked up about Divine Command Theory and don't like the first choice, but that's just because they don't understand Natural Law. To those who do, it's not only palatable, but the only reasonable approach. So there's no dilemma after all, and considering this goes all the way back to Aristotle, you wouldn't think anyone would be puzzled by it any more. Unfortunately, people nowadays don't know their Aristotle from their elbow.

I have already defended the notion that the Euthyphro dilemma confuses "logical priority" with "chronological priority" when speaking of God and "goodness".

My argument is that God wills independently of His nature, since "natures" don't will anything at....but persons do.

But if we say that God wills necessarily from His own nature, then we are left with an unpleasant compatibilism with respect to God's decision making.

I would say that God's nature and God's will have no chronological ordering. Both exist in a contiguous relationship. However, with respect to logical ordering, God's will takes priority. I take the Holy Trinity as illustrative of this distinction between chronological and logical, priority. The Son and Holy Spirit having the ascriptions of "begotten" and "proceeds", respectively, express logical relationships rather than chronological manifestations.

So we say that God is good because He wills the "good". In other words, ascribing goodness to God is based exclusively on His willing. Hence we say that "God is good" because we observe that He acts in accordance with principles that we possess innately as creatures created in "God's image".

As for God's nature....no one has ever seen, or ever can see, God's "nature". His nature is ever beyond the grasp of human intellect. However, we do know God from His manifesting of Divine energy qua the created universe. So when we observe the "goodness" of the creation, we are affirming that God is good, insofar as our mind rightly apprehends God's energies.

So God's acts, along with our basic intuitions of "goodness", are the reasons why we ascribe "good" to God. In other words, we know that God is good from our own experience of the material universe.

Accept the arbitrariness horn, but ascribe the arbitrariness to the non-moral goods (or natural goods) that moral reason says we ought to promote in others. (And the non-moral 'bads' we ought to avoid promoting).

'Good' and 'bad' in the moral sense just pick out which end we're aiming for, the natural good of another person, or the natural bad. (Of course, we disagree on what constitute non-moral goods and bads; hence normative ethical debate.)

The gods could suddenly change the laws of biology so that hitting people makes them healthier and happier (ie is non-morally good). But then it would indeed become morally acceptable to punch people; that's not especially controversial.

On the other hand, if 'good' and 'bad' in the moral sense just tell us which end we're aiming for, the gods couldn't suddenly decide that it's MORALLY good to hit people if in fact it hurts them and messes up their noses. Not according to the way we all use the term 'morally'. It wouldn't be morally anything; they'd have collapsed the idea of moral judgement altogether and replaced it with something else.

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About Me

I am the author of C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, published by Inter-Varsity Press. I received a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.